A Killing Night

by Jonathon King

  “Max?”

  Richards was repeating my name.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning to her. Her eye color was a definite gray and the eyes themselves were tightened down from lack of sleep.

  “This is the manager?” she asked, nodding at Laurie.

  “Yeah.”

  Laurie looked up from her receipts and Richards bobbed her chin up in a beckoning motion. Laurie raised an index finger, one minute please, calculating something in her head before coming over. Richards didn’t like the finger, I could see it in the flex of her jaw muscle. But she let it ride.

  “Sherry Richards, we talked on the phone?” she said when Laurie made it over.

  “Oh, hi, yeah. Just let me get my things. We can sit back there if that’s OK?”

  The three of us took a table in the far corner. I brought my bottle with me.

  “You two obviously know each other,” Laurie said, and I apologized.

  “Max Freeman,” I said, reaching across the table to shake her hand.

  “Rolling Rock,” she said, smiling.

  “You’re very good at that. Remembering, I mean.”

  She shrugged.

  “Part of the business. Half the people who come in here I know by their drinks. Half I know by their first names.”

  “Any full names?” Richards said.

  “A handful,” she said, looking Richards in the eye. “You know, it’s informal. It’s just the way it is.”

  “You ever see this guy in here?” Richards asked, taking out a shot of O’Shea and handing it across the table. She wasn’t wasting any time worrying about tainting an eyewitness with a single suspect photo.

  “Yeah. Not a real regular and not recently, but yeah, he’s been in here. Uh, bottle of Bud and Irish whiskey, I think.”

  “Do you know if he knew Suzy? Dated her? Took her home some night?”

  Laurie brought out a manila file folder and opened it on the table. Now she was all business, too.

  “Like I told you on the phone, Detective, Suzy only worked here four months, till the end of the year. September eight, to, uh, just after New Year’s, the third,” she said, looking at the dates on the top sheet in the file. “Biggest paydays of the year, then she splits.”

  She looked over at me like I’d be sympathetic.

  “I never had a complaint, but she mostly worked the later shifts when I wasn’t around. She worked that last weekend and left.”

  “Disappeared,” Richards said. “No forwarding address. No calls back to you for references. Didn’t pick up her last check.”

  Laurie was answering each question with a shake of her head.

  “I hadn’t even heard her name mentioned until last week when her mom called all upset and then I reported it like she asked.

  “I wish I had more for her mom, and you, but I don’t,” she said and pushed the folder an inch closer to Richards and crossed her arms. The manager was getting defensive.

  “Laurie,” I jumped in, pulling her eyes to me. “How unusual is that? I mean for an employee to just walk away?”

  “It happens a lot. Not as much in a place like this, but in the big, high-traffic clubs, a lot. The girls can make good money, but they move around from place to place. Sometimes they’ll work in three different bars at the same time. Different shifts, different days. If they decide to drop one, they just do it. Sometimes without telling anyone.”

  “What do you mean by not so much in a place like this?” I said.

  “This is more of a neighborhood place. Quieter. You don’t have to yell over the bass music just to take an order. The girls actually like to work here to take a break from those places. At least you can talk to the customers here.”

  “Was Suzy friendly with any specific customers?” Richards asked, pulling the conversation back on line.

  “Not that I know of. A couple of guys asked where she went but they’re our regulars. They get uncomfortable if things change. It’s like a routine for them.”

  “So you don’t know if anyone tried to pick her up?”

  Laurie smiled.

  “Honey, they’re always trying. But Suzy was pretty shy. Kinda quiet. Some of the bartenders get into the girl talk thing. Even know each other’s last names. But mostly they hang out with each other and do the other bars together, but they don’t get that personal.

  “They’ll say ‘whoa, check out gin and tonic down at the end’ or they’ll describe some date they had with the big tipper who went dutch over at Coyote’s. You know, typical stuff. You were there.”

  This last comment was directed at Richards, who tried to look surprised.

  “Yeah. I heard about you working some shifts over at Runyon’s and Guppy’s,” Laurie said. “Gossip like that gets around.”

  “Not that it did any good,” Richards said, looking away, the first time I’d seen her lose that hard edge of hers in public.

  “Well, it did scare the shit out of everybody,” Laurie said. “The girls started being more careful. They did this little half-serious game of picking out the killer in each shift.”

  “Yeah? And did they come up with any consensus?” Richards asked, digging right back in.

  “Sure. Carmine. That creepy little delivery boy from the Italian place who is under age and is always trying to schmooze a drink.”

  She laughed at some mental image of Carmine. Richards was not amused.

  “So, what? It’s a joke and everything goes back to normal?”

  “Almost,” Laurie said, tightening her mouth back up. “But not until Josie, this girl who worked three different places and then dropped out of sight and nobody knew where.”

  Richards got out a notebook from her jeans pocket to write something down.

  “Three weeks later she comes waltzing back in here one night with a big rock on her finger telling everybody how the Chivas Regal guy and her eloped to Vegas,” Laurie said, again looking straight at Richards. “Then everything went back to normal.”

  The table went quiet for a couple of moments.

  “Anyone else here close to Suzy we could talk to?” I said, making an obvious motion to the girl working behind the bar who I had been watching in the mirrored wall next to us. It may have just been her curiosity, but somebody she had more than a customer relationship with had bolted out of here when Richards came in and the bartender noticed it, and now she was way too twitchy watching her boss talk to us.

  “No. Not really. Marci only worked weekends and didn’t come on full until a few weeks ago. They never even met,” Laurie said. “Carla worked with her. I think she tried to get Suzy to share rent on an apartment. But like I said, she was kinda shy. Had a place of her own.

  “Carla’s got the Sunday shift this week. But you’re not going to get the girls all scared again, are you?”

  Richards put her notebook away and pushed the folder one inch back to the other side of the table.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she stood. “But maybe they ought to be scared.”

  I followed Richards outside and stayed a step behind as she walked down the sidewalk toward the street that ran behind the shopping plaza. She didn’t turn or say a word and I was just about to say fuck it and reverse myself and head back to my truck when she stopped at the trunk of a two-door convertible and leaned her butt against the back fender and looked up at me.

  “New ride?” I said, trying to cut the tension.

  “What do you have for me, Max?” she said, folding her arms in front of her. The paring lights high above put an unnatural shine to her tight blonde hair and a slick paleness to the planes of her face. She looked years older than I knew her to be.

  “You’re taking this too personal, Sherry.”

  I put my hands in my pockets. Neutral. Unthreatening. You learn body language when you are a cop.

  “Somebody has to, Max. You haven’t talked to the mothers of these last two girls, who haven’t seen their daughters or heard from them for weeks or even months. They read me their last l
etters. They send pictures that are years old. High school portraits you get in those same envelopes with the gummy flaps and the sizes and package deals printed all over them. They want to show me Mother’s Day cards they got from a completely different state three years ago. They tell me their daughter’s hobbies. ‘Oh, she loves the beach and horseback riding.’

  “They’re desperate, Max. And every goddamn agency that they get passed to next tells them until there’s evidence of a crime…”

  She lowered her head and I took a step toward her and she put up a palm to stop me.

  “I’m sorry, Max.” She looked up. “What do you have for me?”

  I put my hands back in my pockets. I told her about the trip to Philly and the meeting with O’Shea’s ex-wife. Without getting into my background with Meagan, I gave her a rundown on my conversations with IAD.

  “Christ, you’d at least think that hard-ass lieutenant up there would want to throw some help into this,” she said, and I had to work to sustain a poker face.

  “The ex-wife says O’Shea never got threatening. Never physical. In fact, she of all people was sure he wouldn’t have the guts to carry something off like this and I gotta tell you, Sherry, I get the same vibe.”

  She turned her face away and looked down the shadowed street and her lips were pressed into a whitening crease.

  “Be objective, Sherry. You’ve got an ex-cop who liked to bounce from bar to bar, dates some bartenders, has a couple of failed trips with women and the capacity for violence with assholes on the street,” I said. “That’s a profile that could fit me and another two dozen guys in the business we’re in. Maybe he’s carrying some kind of guilty stink from what happened up in Philly, but you’ve got nothing on him.”

  “We’ll see,” she said and pushed herself off the car with a flex of her thighs.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve got a warrant to search his place,” she said, walking around to open the driver’s door. “One of your muggers from the other night is filing charges saying your buddy tried to kick him to death. He was bleeding and we think we might get some forensics from O’Shea’s boots to match it.”

  I hoped my face didn’t look as stunned and stupid as it felt.

  “What the hell does that have to do with missing women?” I said.

  “You know the game, Max. Maybe we can squeeze him. You never know what a little pressure will bring out once you have somebody inside.”

  She got in her car and started the engine and I stepped back as she pulled away. Maybe my former girlfriend hadn’t just used me. But that’s what it felt like.

  After Richards left I walked back to my truck and sat in the parking lot watching the door to Kim’s, grinding, nowhere to be and not feeling like going back inside. At eleven I walked over to Big Louie’s, the Italian restaurant and pizzeria at the front corner of the strip mall. I got some manicotti and coffee to go. I may have even seen Carmine the delivery boy, an angular kid with coat hanger shoulders and a definite acne problem. He had a horselike face and a patch of peroxide blonde hair. He actually had some kind of tattoo on his calf that was impossible to decipher as it wrapped around a leg the diameter of a garden hose. If he tried to abduct one of the bartenders they would have slapped him silly.

  Back in the truck I lowered the window to let the gathering odor of red sauce and garlic escape and had my dinner off the passenger seat. On occasion a lone man would approach the door of Kim’s and I would focus my small field glasses from the glove box on him. What the hell was I on surveillance for? Had walking around on my old beat for a couple of days put me back in the zone?

  I took another bite of pasta and watched a couple bend their heads together at the corner, instantly thought drug deal, and then chastised myself when I saw the flare of the man’s lighter as they shared the flame to light their cigarettes. It was then that I realized the new fissure I was grinding was the man I’d seen slip away from the bar in Kim’s when Richards had walked in. I’d caught the white glow of his skin between his hairline and collar as he disappeared into the dark and the smooth, athletic grace that got him to the hallway without a stumble or hesitation. There would of course be lots of reasons for someone to bail out of the back of a bar when a detective walked in the front, even if she was plainclothes, even if she just looked the part, and we both probably looked the part to someone paying attention. But the bartender had added to the feel that it wasn’t right. If young Marci had some kind of drug dealing going on under the bar, even small-time stuff, they’d be careful. But there had been something in her eyes that lit my suspicion. Whether it was a carryover from my walk down South Street or not, here I was and it didn’t necessarily feel wrong. Nice warm night. Box of manicotti. Hot coffee. Shit. I used to hate surveillance.

  At one in the morning I decided to move. The lot was clearing and I had counted three times that a city patrol car had cruised through the center and now he was back. I watched the cop pull into a darkened spot almost in a direct line between me and the windows of Kim’s, obstructing the view I’d had of Marci’s bobbing blonde ponytail. It looked like he was going to stay awhile. Maybe he was there purposely to look after employees of the restaurants and the bar who were getting off work. Maybe some shift sergeant was paying attention to Richards’s concerns after all. I did know that if this cop was smart he was going to notice me before long—single male in a pickup truck parked for hours and up to no good.

  I started the engine and pulled out of the lot through the back street exit and swung west. There was another parking area used by movie patrons of the multiplex next door. With the right angle, I could still see Kim’s front door and would hopefully see when Marci left and if she was picked up by a six-foot athletic man who shied away from the smell of cops.

  An hour later my coffee was long dead and cold. The movie had let out and I’d watched couples stroll to their cars and head home, chatting about the merits of plot and pyrotechnics and performances. The last movie I’d been to was with Sherry and the damn thing was out on DVD and could have been having its broadcast debut by now. The night had settled into that long after- hours feel when the city drops in decibels and the streetlights take on a more noticeable presence and the cut of headlights across a brick facade sends shadows moving that you would not have seen at ten o’clock.

  At 2:20 Marci walked out through the wide wooden door. An older man was behind her and had his fist up against the deadbolt on the inside. We both watched the girl go to a late model, light blue two-door parked right in front and unlock the driver’s side. She waved at the old guy who stepped back and pulled the bar door shut. Marci backed out of her spot and came my way, her lights flashing off my truck windows as she bounced over a speed bump and then turned onto the street. All right, I thought. It was an old cop’s hunch. Sometimes that’s all they are. I sure as hell wasn’t going to follow the girl home. I pulled out of my own parking space and as I approached the street another set of headlights met mine. They jounced over the speed bump and I caught the opaque blue tint of the light bar on top. It was the patrol car. Done for the night. Everybody out safe.

  He turned left, without a signal, in the direction Marci had gone. My headlights caught the outline of a dark-haired male officer, clean-cut, and then I turned north toward the beach house.

  The annoying trill of the cell phone woke me the next day, snapping a dream that had me somewhere in the Everglades, someplace other than my river, someplace where I was unfamiliar and lost in a wooded hammock of gumbo limbo and poisonwood trees. It was night and I was crouched in a cover of fern, watching the glowing red spots of a gator’s eyes that were becoming larger, though for some reason I felt no fear of them and as I tracked their movement through the trees they took on the shape of a car’s taillights and I suddenly heard the sound of a horn in traffic which became the ring of my phone.

  I swung my legs off the bed and blinked away the odd smell of the exhaust and marsh grass and picked up the cell.

&
nbsp; “Yeah?”

  “Freeman?”

  It was a man’s voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s O’Shea, Freeman.”

  I registered the Philly accent and recalled I’d given O’Shea my card at Archie’s.

  “Yeah, Colin. What’s up?”

  “I don’t want to say you dropped a dime on me, Freeman. So tell me it isn’t true,” he said, biting off the ends of accusatory sentences.

  “Well, you just said it, O’Shea,” I answered, my head quickly clearing. “So tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “The sheriff’s office just executed a search warrant on my apartment.”

  I was recalling Richards’s squeeze plan.

  “Did they arrest you?”

  “Not yet. But I would like to know how the fuck they put me with you when your two muggers tried to take you off the other night and I saved your ass, again, brother.”

  I felt my anger mix with an unexpected whiff of guilt which tempered my response.

  “I didn’t tell them you were with me, O’Shea. But you’re also not dealing with some dumb-ass detective with Richards,” I said. “She was the one who put me onto you at your local hangout and a description by those two assholes and your patented boot work wouldn’t be hard to put together. Your IAD file back home isn’t exactly vague on the excessive-force complaints, either.”

  There was nothing but an empty electronic buzz on the other end of the line for several long beats.

  “I’m gonna need a lawyer if this goes any further, Max,” he finally said. “How’s this guy Manchester you work for?”

  Billy was brilliant, but the idea of him acting as a criminal defense attorney for a guy like O’Shea gave me more than a few seconds of doubt. I still couldn’t say why I was walking a line with him. But guilty or not, he was going to need a good lawyer.